Project Management Scheduling and Cost Control

computerweekly.com 13-19 November 2012 23

Home

News

goverNmeNt releases opeN

staNdards policy

barclays bids to cHaNge tHe

baNkiNg mould

How a New york dataceNtre coped witH superstorm

loNdoN 2012 cio oN followiNg

olympic success

editor’s commeNt

opiNioN

buyer’s guide to iNfrastructure

oN demaNd

briNgiNg greater agility to

dataceNtres

case study: moviNg email

iNto tHe cloud

dowNtime

Case study

Charged with building a better, faster and cheaper email system, university of Nebraska cio Walter Weir accepted the challenge and upped the ante. Within a year, his it team moved 13,000 staff and faculty members from an on-premises legacy Lotus Notes system to office 365 – microsoft’s cloud-based system. the migration cut the cost of providing and supporting email nearly in half, and will save the uni- versity an additional $2m over the next five years. and, in the six months since those 13,000 people started on the new system, Weir has fielded just four complaints.

“the calls have been relatively minor,” says Weir. “‘i used to be able to see this and this on the same screen, now i can’t.’ i tell them how to do it and they’re okay.”

how did he pull off adopting a new technology with hardly a hitch? there was no magic to it, Weir is quick to point out. old-fashioned planning and project management, along with a deep knowledge of his team’s technical capabilities, made it possible.

Consulting work done in-house For Weir, the cloud migration of the university’s email was as much about the people involved as it was about the technology product being deployed. after reviewing bids from Google, microsoft, Dell and iBm, Weir determined that microsoft office 365’s software- as-a-service (saas) best met the university’s needs in terms of cost and security. to avoid consulting costs, the work was done by Weir’s own staff.

“We’re pretty smart, we’ve got talented people, we know about active Directory and fed- eration and all those back-end concerns,” Weir says. “We put a project team together, had a

D EN

is ta

N G

N Ey

JR /i

st o

c k

ph o

to

Five reasons

Exchange shops delay Office

365 migrations

How SMEs migrate to

cloud-based services

University migrates to Office 365 for cloud-based email CIO Walter Weir talks to Karen Goulart about moving 13,000 people with minimum complaints and the value of old-fashioned project management

university of nebraska

computerweekly.com 13-19 November 2012 24

Home

News

goverNmeNt releases opeN

staNdards policy

barclays bids to cHaNge tHe

baNkiNg mould

How a New york dataceNtre coped witH superstorm

loNdoN 2012 cio oN followiNg

olympic success

editor’s commeNt

opiNioN

buyer’s guide to iNfrastructure

oN demaNd

briNgiNg greater agility to

dataceNtres

case study: moviNg email

iNto tHe cloud

dowNtime

Case study

charter and a project manager. We had vari- ous entities across the structure working on creating the back-end environment to sup- port it, and it worked very well for us.”

Assessing IT skills for migration Weir was confident about the capabilities of his team of 40 it professionals. thanks to an ongoing homework assignment he has given himself, he knew exactly what team members could handle. For several years, he has conducted “skills inventories” of his technical staff to assess each individual’s level of knowledge and where the group stands as a whole.

“i have a whole list of things anyone in the it business could possibly know about, including programming languages, devel- opmental tools and databases,” Weir says. his employees score themselves on their knowledge and supervisors review those lists to check they are in agreement. as a result, Weir has a running inventory of his workers’ skills so when projects come in, he knows whether the work can be done in-house.

Redeploying IT staff a major part of Weir’s charge in the email cloud migration was to cut costs, but he was clear from the outset of the project that this would not happen by cutting jobs.

“We saw the savings that would accrue by virtue of not having the hardware here and having a different cost model structure for licensing of the environment, so we repur- posed our staff,” Weir says. “it was an oppor- tunity to say, ‘Where do we need staff?’”

the primary answer was “in security,” so staff working on email management were retrained accordingly. Even with the new cloud environment, mail experts were still needed for certain provisioning and adminis- trative activities, but they too were retrained to take on other primary tasks, with email on the back burner.

“We had more work than we have people. i look at our task lists and wonder how we’re ever going to get it all done. this was an opportu- nity to repurpose people so we wouldn’t have to hire new people,” Weir says. “Not everybody looks at it that way, but we did.”

Getting faculty and staff on board With his technical team set, Weir didn’t forget the other 13,000 people invested in the project. the change could be a big adjustment for faculty and staff accustomed to the Lotus

key requirements

When the university of nebraska decided to move four of its campuses to the microsoft office 365 cloud-based solution for email, it was the school’s first major cloud solution implementation. cio Walter Weir and his it team were no novices when it came to stipulating what a bid-winning supplier would have to provide. here’s a sampling of their must-do list:

• Information must be stored in the US. • Solution must be compliant with the

security assertion markup language. • Supplier must demonstrate how solu-

tion will integrate with the current lightweight directory access protocol and active directory.

• Solution must ensure non-university personnel cannot access information in the system; if any such activity occurs, it must be able to be tracked forensically.

• Specific information on the security and access controls within the supplier’s datacentre must be provided.

• Data must be segregated, or assurances must be made regarding a multi-tenant solution.

• Solution must allow for single sign-on. • Support must be provided for multiple

domains. • Supplier must be prepared to respond to

electronic-discovery requests and litiga- tion holds.

• Solution must be able to disable accounts without deleting them.

• Data must be encrypted in transmission, at rest and in the cloud.

• Any changes in the supplier’s environ- ment must be reported immediately.

• System authentication logs must be maintained.

computerweekly.com 13-19 November 2012 25

Home

News

goverNmeNt releases opeN

staNdards policy

barclays bids to cHaNge tHe

baNkiNg mould

How a New york dataceNtre coped witH superstorm

loNdoN 2012 cio oN followiNg

olympic success

editor’s commeNt

opiNioN

buyer’s guide to iNfrastructure

oN demaNd

briNgiNg greater agility to

dataceNtres

case study: moviNg email

iNto tHe cloud

dowNtime

Case study

Notes email, scheduling and other tools they had relied on for 15 years. Weir was deter- mined everyone would have a chance to be educated and get comfortable with the change.

Weir set up communication teams on each of the school’s four campuses and scheduled information sessions about why the change was being made. user training sessions showed side-by-side differences in the systems and how to carry out tasks in office 365. “any change is culturally challenging, but we were public about what we were doing.” Weir says. “there was a lot of communication.”

Weir’s team also reached out to users for the vital task of application rationalisation – the process of finding out whether an application is still needed by asking why it was built, what it costs to maintain, what platform it is on and what value it holds. over the years, hundreds of applica- tions were developed within the Lotus Notes development suite and, before the switch to microsoft, Weir needed to know whether they would be missed.

“if you can’t justify it, it’s a candidate for elimination,” he says. through the application rationalisation process, his team was able to eliminate 90% of the Lotus-developed apps. Just a handful of workflow-related apps remained and they are being remade to fit into the new structure.

Embracing cloud solutions as the future norm as for Weir’s next foray into cloud? Despite a successful first major outing in the cloud, he is proceeding with caution. Email, being a commodity type of service, seemed like a good place to start testing the waters. he’s got his eye on cloud-based storage and is intrigued by the possibilities of enterprise resource planning (ERp) in the cloud.

“We’re starting to see things like Workday – where hR and finance are being pushed out to cloud environments,” Weir says. “Whether it’s private, public or hybrid clouds, we’re going to see more of the cloud, as people figure out how to provide more services at less cost.”

For cios who have not taken the first steps toward cloud, Weir points to factors that played a part in his success, starting with talking to professional colleagues who have been there and done that. For Weir, this meant striking up conversations with it leaders at the university of arizona and Louisiana state university. “somewhere out there is an early adopter; find them, reach out and talk to them,” he says. “ask what they’re doing and why and what kind of num- bers they’re looking at.”

While Weir by-passed outside experts for his email cloud solution deployment, such experts have their place. his team received advice from consultancy firm Gartner: “they talked about email in the cloud in terms of strategy – was it all hype or were there hard sav-

ings? What’s real? What’s not real?” Weir says. additionally, he says, it’s important for cios to have a con-

versation with their staff about their willingness and ability to adapt to a new way of doing business because it’s vital they be on board. Leaving unanswered questions can incite fear. “you want to be upfront and tell them we’re doing this for the

following reasons, and this is how it’s going to play out.” most importantly – though it’s often overlooked – cios should be sure to have a simi-

lar conversation with the business side, Weir says. a project that makes perfect sense from an it perspective requires an equally compelling business case. “talk to the senior administrators you’re supporting, and make sure all those players are onboard with what you’re doing. it’s one thing to have great ideas as an it person, it’s another thing selling it to the organisation.” n

“any change is culTurally challenging, buT we were public abouT whaT we were doing”

This article first appeared Computer Weekly’s sister title, SearchCIO.com

› Email security best practices for email SaaS › An SME migrates to Microsoft Office 365

› Universities to research IT as a Utility

Copyright of Computer Weekly is the property of TechTarget, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed

to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,

users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.